Something is afoot. Something is stirring and shifting. It shouldn’t be a surprise, yet somehow it is. Spiritual emergency, which is all about rebirth, is going through a rebirth of its own. A term first coined back in the 1980s, interest in the phenomenon had waned; awareness and understanding of this transpersonal approach to psychospiritual crisis had fallen away.Now, as we hurtle towards the 2012 Winter Solstice, people are waking up and realising that we need this understanding, this information, more than ever.What am I going by? What are the signs? First, there’s the recently launched work of The Wakeup: New Earth Alliance for Addiction Recovery. The team approaches addiction from the perspective of spiritual emergency, which makes so much sense. You can find out more about their wonderful work at http://www.the-wakeup.com/. You can join their Ning community at http://thewakeup.ning.com/Then there’s the initiative to launch a new Spiritual Crisis Network in Holland. I’ll be speaking at the conference to mark this exciting new development at the University of Leiden on 15 & 16 September. www.parapsy.nl May there be many more such national networks to join the existing ones!

Emma Bragdon, who wrote a classic spiritual emergency text back in the 1980s, has two new books out: Resources for Extraordinary Healing: Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Other Serious Mental Illnesses (Lightening Up Press) and Spiritism and Mental Health: Practices from Spiritist Centers and Spiritist Psychiatric Hospitals (Singing Dragon, a Jessica Kingsley Publishers imprint). Her work today is still very much about helping to shift to the new paradigm of mental health.To cap it all, George Noory on the American radio show Coast to Coast discussed this very subject recently with his guests Dr Seth Farber, dissident psychologist and co-founder of the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry and Paul Levy. Farber’s point is that many forms of ‘mental illness’ are actually spiritual and supernatural experiences. Check out Paul Levy’s website: http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/

Finally, the Beyond Meds blog is covering many angles of spiritual emergency these days: http://beyondmeds.com/All I can say about these initiatives is ‘thank goodness’! Thank you to all these dedicated people for what they are bringing to the collective consciousness right now. When I heard recently of yet another tragedy caused by mental health staff dismissing the spiritual dimension, I was reminded of how desperately needed this awareness and understanding is. But then I never really forget.

The Shift; the birth of a new era; the global awakening of consciousness. It’s what everybody’s talking about! Especially at the recent L. A. Conscious Life Expo! Some of you were there, no doubt inspired and uplifted by the dozens of workshops and lectures. I felt honored to speak alongside international names such as Gregg Braden and Barbara Marx Hubbard.

The Shift; the birth of a new era; the global awakening of consciousness. It’s what everybody’s talking about! Especially at the recent L. A. Conscious Life Expo! Some of you were there, no doubt inspired and uplifted by the dozens of workshops and lectures. I felt honored to speak alongside international names such as Gregg Braden and Barbara Marx Hubbard. I took the opportunity at the Expo of hearing Barbara speak. What an amazing woman! 82 years old and she has a vision for the future of humanity that is utterly compelling. I was so encouraged that she and I are talking the same language, of moving from breakdown to breakthrough. Whether that’s personal breakdown or the breakdown of old values and institutions that are no longer working for us, the principles are the same. We need healing and growth at the individual and global levels. And of course the two mirror each other, are part of this same process of huge evolutionary shift. My new book, ‘In Case of Spiritual Emergency’, deals mainly with the personal level, with the awakening of consciousness and how to cope with the challenges of that speeding up and tipping over into crisis. I draw parallels between that individual, micro level and the global, macro level that Barbara is talking about. We have, in fact, entered a period of global spiritual emergency. When spiritual awakening or emergence speeds up, as it is now, it can tip over into spiritual emergency, presenting us with many challenges. Fortunately, we can learn so much and draw so much hope and inspiration from understanding how that works at the personal level. One thing to know is that not a single person I have come across in all my work and research regrets going through spiritual emergency. Humanity will not regret these challenging times we are going through. Barbara focuses very much on the positive, on what is working, encouraging the principle of ‘co-creation’, of working creatively and collaboratively to take our evolution forward. Where our messages dovetail is in seeing the vast potential of these times, in seeing our vast potential, collectively, to move through spiritual emergency. Each and every one of us can contribute to that!